The Actual Israel vs. Hasbara Historical past

This text is tailored from a lecture on the 2025 Revisionist Historical past of Struggle Confernece on the Mises Institite. 

When America’s regime historians replicate on historical past’s tragedies and travesties, they all the time reward Pax Americana. That’s the concept that American hegemony introduced peace to the world.

Conveniently, they omit the horrors of it.

Naturally, regime historians, those we’re right here (on the Mises Institute’s Revisionist Historical past of Struggle Convention, in Auburn, Alabama) to counter, converse lots about Hitler, however infrequently point out Hiroshima.

Likewise has Israel formed its previous, mixing some historical past with fantasy, to render a myth-history. The propaganda sustaining Israel’s counterfeit historical past is known as Hasbara, clarification in Hebrew.

Hasbara constructs serve to coat Israel’s actual crimes in opposition to humanity with ideological respectability, to offer these some imagined purity of function. Consider Hasbara because the regular provide of bogus, synthetic constructs to rape actuality.

Undeniably, American overseas coverage has a sure narrative expertise. The injustices of imperial energy, however, persons are persuaded by the strut of it. Much less apparent is the enchantment of Israeli Hasbara and the Jewish supremacy that goes with it—and has seduced many Christians into ignoring Christ’s core teachings.

Christ instructions care, not for the oppressor and the predator, however for the poor and the oppressed.

Hasbara and official myth-history apart, due to Gaza you don’t should know a lot historical past in any respect to reach on the reality about Israel. Actuality is reality. The fact of genocide offers rise to irrefutable truths. Due to Gazans, the residing and the martyred, the reality about Israel is now ahistoric.

Shortly after October 7, with the graduation, in Gaza, of Israel’s “Operation Swords of Iron,” sure self-evident truths turned crystal clear.

By late October, Israel’s actions inside and with out Gaza had proven the world absolutely the depravity of Israel, state and civil society. One such emerged actuality is that, Palestinians, not Israeli Jews, as Hasbara teaches, are probably the most imperiled folks on this planet; Israelis probably the most perilous.

One other is that Israel, with overwhelming assist from the Jewish-Israeli public, has gleefully engaged in methodical, indiscriminate, industrial-scale homicide and ethnic cleaning ongoing.

The Israel Protection Forces, IDF, had been allowed to obliterate all the basics of bodily, nationwide and financial life in Gaza, turning it into an uninhabitable “post-apocalyptic wasteland.” The Strip has been lowered to its sub-soil particulate parts, solely badly dirty. 

Gaza is now a mass grave alongside a small stretch of the Mediterranean Sea, the place residing ghosts wander.

Gaza’s soil is soaked by means of with a mixture of tens of millions of tons of constructing particles, the decaying our bodies of tens-of-thousands of human beings, their pets, livestock; fauna, flora all gone—an inferno of rubbish, open sewage, and the byproducts and contaminants of munitions, like unexploded ordnance.

Mentioned a scholar of the structure of Occupation: Israel has “stolen” from Gaza’s Palestinians “the very potential to provide meals.” Or, obtain it. Or use technique of trade to get it. Banking was dismantled.

Imagine it or not, however beneath years of a medieval blockade, Gaza’s farmers had, earlier than October 7, fed a 3rd of their folks.

Certainly, Israel has systemized the mass homicide and displacement of harmless Palestinian civilians, concentrating on them and their habitat for Complete Warfare.

Since conflict in opposition to civilians is a conflict on civilization; Israel, by extension, is an enemy of civilization.

Our ally Israel is a rustic through which genocide, snuff movies, extra-judicial assassinations, rape, theft, torture and hunger of Palestinians are de facto authorized. Israel is thus a prison entity, and a risk to the comity of countries.

The indictment in opposition to Israel should be hermetically sealed. Israel’s ethnocide and domicide in Gaza is in violation of most programs of ethics recognized to man over mental historical past—it’s in violation of God’s legislation, the Ten Commandments. These command to not covet, steal or homicide. It’s in violation of libertarian legislation (the axiom of non-aggression). It’s in violation of pure justice, the legal guidelines of conflict (though genocide is just not conflict), in addition to humanitarian legislation.

And it’s in violation of the programs of legislation inside which the above is subsumed: The pure legislation and the optimistic legislation.

Proper and mistaken are common, not relative. The Sixth Commandment is neither opinion nor non-obligatory. “Thou shalt not homicide” or mass homicide is known as a commandment for a motive. There isn’t any tribal privilege clause hooked up to it. Like gentiles, Jews are enjoined in opposition to wanton homicide.

But Israelis now flout the Sixth Commandment with ugly audacity.

Over the months, I’ve intently noticed Israel because it pulverizes inhabitants facilities throughout the Levant. I’ve listened within the Hebrew, to Jewish-Israeli public and political discourse.

In Hebrew, Jewish-Israeli public personalities, and the general public, categorical an impatient, snarling contempt for accusations of genocide, providing an unbroken stream of genocide-justification Hasbara.

It’s like Israeli-Jews are yawning, ready on the world to get up to the truth that their lives do matter extra. And that any aberrant motion taken to make them really feel protected have to be allowed.

And it’s allowed. Israel has performed its genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza to a packed home: to the world.

Israeli-Jews don’t lack for information; however most look like with out the analytical and moral colleges to look at their actions. They lead the unexamined lives of self-anointed superior beings.

Societally, majorities seem to venture the sense that their sectarian supremacy transcends the common ethical order, to which worldwide legislation, the pure legislation and the Decalogue give expression.

The pure legislation is a system of ethics knowable by means of motive, revelation and expertise, whichever floats your boat. As a result of it’s anchored within the very existential nature of man and actuality, the Pure Legislation is the best legislation recognized to man and is due to this fact deductively true and simply.

An instance is the libertarian non-aggression axion.

For causes apparent, there needs to be no distinction between how classical liberals or anarchists perceive the non-aggression axion, which is the organizing precept of libertarianism. Minarchist, anarchist or statist; genocide is forbidden.

The optimistic legislation, then again, is a creation of the State. Authorized positivism equates justice with the legislation of The State.

In teasing out proper from mistaken, we discriminate between acts which are prison as a result of The State has criminalized them, versus acts that are universally prison.

Most civilizing programs of ethics stipulate that nobody has the correct to kill a single harmless human being, not to mention hundreds-of-thousands of members of a gaggle.

There once more, Israel’s sacking of Gaza is universally evil.

Lest I be accused of arguing in circles across the definition of genocide, I’ll briefly point out genocide within the context of the worldwide vs. the pure legislation.

Israel has aced the genocide bar, specifically the prohibitions, in Article II of the Genocide Conference, on destroying a gaggle, in complete or partially, and or on making life insufferable for that group.

Mens rea, intent in Western jurisprudence and judicial philosophy, is a element of genocide:

If Palestinians had been accorded equality earlier than legislation—any legislation, nationwide or worldwide—then by 2023’s finish, logically, and maybe legally, Israelis would have been seen as having each spoken their responsible minds and acted out their genocidal intent on the bottom.

Mass homicide isn’t “unintentional” when it’s inevitable and incidental to your “mission.” If prematurely that your actions will trigger the deaths of thousands-upon-thousands of innocents; hooked up to your prison actions (actus reus) is a responsible thoughts (mens rea).

America shares in Israel’s genocidal responsible thoughts. The US regime has been a worshipful companion in Israel’s vice. It has equipped munitions for mass-murder. It has offered diplomatic cowl. It has issued a minimum of seven vetoes and abstention within the UN Safety Council to allow Israel’s continued atrocities. For desirous to expel, arrest, protest or boycott Israelis, America has menaced international locations, authorized organs and American residents.

America has helped Israeli Hasbara in asserting self-defense to justify collective punishment.

And America has helped Israel to border state terrorism as self-defense, normalizing the structural violence that’s the State of Israel.

The genocide of Gazans was fortunately and willingly underwritten by the US authorities, the American political class, and its Julius Streicher media, which, even mid-murder, describe Israelis as victims.

On the matter of industrial-scale mass homicide: worldwide legislation is just not at odds with the pure legislation or the libertarian legislation.

Such is the case of Article II of the Conference on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. It articulates, principally, a set of damaging rights. Their enforcement imposes no burden on anyone however the sadistic, sociopathic serial killers beneath dialogue.

Most libertarians would concede that The State now acts extra-judicially, and that any remnants of the pure legislation as soon as embedded within the US Structure have long-since been buried beneath the rubble of laws and statute.

Allow us to say, then, that to the extent that legislation—native, worldwide, tribal—upholds not more than pure rights, legislation is OK. To the extent that legislation violates the rights to life, liberty, and property—legislation is dangerous. To the extent state legislation agrees with the pure legislation—to that extent it’s inoffensive.

By extension, it issues not who upholds the rights of Palestinians to life and land, simply as long as somebody does.

It issues not which state, which federal official or worldwide group, or which platoon, Hizballah or the Houthis—simply as long as somebody does.

In America, federalism means “divided sovereignty,” which, if we’re to take James Madison significantly, ought to make it tough for states to start executing their residents.

Why would it not be a matter of respect for a rustic’s “sovereignty” to permit Israel to systematically execute occupied, subjugated populations, on the off-chance that they get rid of some terrorists, whom by now many think about resistance fighters?

Make no mistake; In human rights legislation there’s a duty to guard a group that’s being evicted and eradicated. There’s a proper to withstand, too, beneath the “Hague Rules on Belligerent Occupation.” Neither offends the pure legislation.

Resistance fighters argue that they’re heeding this calling, The “Duty to Defend” (R2P).

Israel should have been forcibly stopped; its harmless victims protected. You don’t placate a John Wayne Gacy and a Jeffrey Dahmer…You cease them.

However not because the Axis of Genocide sees it.

The Arab societies are non-woke societies. The truth that Gaza, the West Financial institution, Syria and Yemen had been and are largely conventional societies, not coopted, Woke societies, has definitely helped the West justify their mistreatment.

You see, the Woke Masters of the Western Universe, think about non-woke societies as with out the pure proper of resistance. Their resistance we name terrorism. 

Provided that no person has successfully upheld the authorized “Duty to Defend” Palestinians, all however the spirit of Gaza is gone.

Contemplate the Nice Palestinian Return to Northern Gaza in January of 2025. Regardless of the erasure of over 2000 Gazan bloodlines, household bushes, gone—an epic occasion passed off:

Processions of Palestinians of their hundreds returned to their ruined houses in Northern Gaza.

You see, the land is central to Palestinian id.

What higher proof is there of the ancestral homesteader claims that Palestinians should Palestine than this devotion, this resilience?

Distinction this Palestinian rootedness and resilience with Israel’s squirrely northern and southern settler populations.

Israeli Jews haven’t returned to cities in Israel’s north or south. Somewhat, their love of the land is based on its ethnic cleaning.

Provided that their military obliterates even the slightest hazard posed by their indigenous neighbors will Israel’s settlers return.

For but extra of a distinction, look, too, on the repulsive ranges of Israeli environmental destruction in Gaza: This speaks, amongst many different issues, to Israel’s profound alienation from an ecosystem it shares and claims to care about.

Israeli-Jews have greed for the land, not a love of it.

Again to our nemesis, The State.

What concerning the ethical authority of a Democratic state? Certainly “our ally Israel shares our democratic values”? Or, so we’re lectured.

Properly, homicide with majority approval remains to be homicide, whomever the perpetrator. Whether or not it’s dedicated by the decree of the one dictator or by the desire of the various; by actors inside or with out The State; by the designated ‘good guys’ or by the ‘dangerous guys’—homicide of innocents is all the time homicide.

You’ll be appropriate to conclude, nevertheless, that this twenty first Century Holocaust is in style. Thumping majorities throughout Israel’s private and non-private sectors have, all through, justified, finessed and fibbed about their military’s AI-driven high-tech depopulation and extermination orgy in Gaza.

Keen to jot down the Palestinian obituary, as late within the genocide as February 2025, 80 p.c of Jewish-Israelis signaled their assist for Trump’s plan for Gaza. Solely three p.c of this cohort thought it immoral.

Trump’s plan is an extension and completion of Joe Biden’s genocide, which included the inner displacement—depopulation—and large-scale extermination of the Strip and its Folks.

First, Donald Trump has proposed to cowl up Israel’s crime of genocide by eradicating the pitiful reveals from the scene of the crime. Subsequent, he deliberate to conclude Joe’s genocide by scattering the survivors throughout the Center East. Israel may have been rescued. Gazans may have ceased to exist as a nation. The liquidation-and-extermination marketing campaign within the Gaza ghetto would have been accomplished.

Debating and committing genocidal violence, forcibly displacing tens of millions, ravenous a subjugated folks: All this Trump backers referred to as “out-of-the-box pondering.”

Who mentioned crime doesn’t pay? When the Superpower inverts the ethical order of the universe; the Crime of All Crimes pays—after which some.

In any case, genocide had received a plebiscite in Israel.

No shock. Bear in mind, the IDF is Israel. It’s a citizen military through which each Israeli should serve. It’s the voice of the Jewish-Israeli commonwealth. Israel’s little kids are the celebrities within the nation’s genocide constellation.

We’ve watched them degree Gaza—vaporize younger males selecting their manner by means of rubble as if in a online game. Mock their victims. Snipe their youngsters. Rape their males. Rob their companies. Rummage by means of the intimate results of individuals useless or dispossessed. Invade and explode total residential buildings.

True, all Israeli Jews are conscripted and should enlist on this military. Nonetheless, the navy draft doesn’t compel a conscript to commit, chronicle, and crow over what’s institutionalized and legalized, serial-killer kind crime.

The pleasure and pleasure seen recorded after which transmitted to the world from hundreds of IDF cellphones over months has been voluntary, spontaneous, and natural to Israeli society’s tenor and venture.

So allow us to hear no Nuremberg protection.

“I used to be solely following orders” should not be tolerated in mitigation of the IDF. The proof is conclusive. IDF shoot, loot and bomb for enjoyable.

Little question, the Israeli State is genocidal. However, by the numbers and by their statements Israeli society is as sociopathic. From janitor to basic; from troopers to supreme court docket justices.

As uncomfortable as that is for the libertarian individualist; the information are clear. On the matter of the genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza; Jewish-Israeli society doesn’t stand aside from the Jewish State.

All through, polled opinion in Israel was not cut up between Israeli Jews for mass homicide vs. Israelis in opposition to mass homicide and ethnic cleaning.

No. The division in Israeli society was between Jewish-Israelis for present ranges of violence in opposition to Gazans, versus these for higher or lesser trade in what had been already industrial-levels and strategies of homicide.

By the polls, nothing outdoors their self-righteous and self-obsessed selves mattered to a preponderance of Jewish-Israelis.

Israeli-Jews, by and huge, have turn out to be a sorority of Jewish supremacists. And Palestinians have paid a horrible value for Israel’s systemic, societal sociopathy.

Ask Israelis about Palestinian infants shredded to bits; and so they’ll dish Hasbara. It’s all in self-defense. And, it’s all of the doing of a 3rd occasion.

Guess who made them do the genocide?

Hamas.

“It’s not me,” says the prison. “Hamas ate my homework; I imply my conscience.” That is Israel’s Third-Occasion idea of culpability. Israel vomits it up. The west laps it up. 

The “Hamas Made Me Mass Homicide” non-sequitur exposes Israel’s Hasbara for its irrationality. Since when do you blame a 3rd occasion on your ongoing crimes in real-time?

Put it this manner, the state through which you reside has no proper to evict you from your property and bomb your neighborhoods as a result of its brokers imagine outlaws cover in your neighborhood.

The “crime of ardour” protection is dangerous sufficient. The Third-Occasion idea of culpability mustn’t ever bolster it.

The “crime of ardour” protection we affiliate with a single occasion. Not with sadistic serial killers, loosed for months-on-end on tens of millions of innocents throughout the By way of Delarosa that’s Gaza.

Sure, Israel has an historic ardour, alright, however for methodical mass homicide.

See, the IDF is just not a combating power; it’s an Airforce. Judged from its actions over time, this Airforce’s goals are to not defeat a daily military. However to pound inhabitants facilities into submission—in Gaza, throughout the Levant, and past.

What different nation has not solely had its killer practices codified in legislation but in addition named?

The “Dahiyeh Doctrine” is called after the southern suburbs of Beirut, upon whose Shia civilians the Israeli Airforce has perfected its predation.

“Mowing the garden” is a time period used throughout Israel to sign homicide sprees in opposition to Palestinian civilians to maintain populations subdued.

Followers of true crime TV will bear in mind the Freeway I-5 serial killer. Think about his killer craft being dubbed the “I-5 Doctrine,” and Wikipedia describing this notorious serial killer as originator of the “I-5 Doctrine.”

Unquestionably, public protest, too, in Israel has adopted a strictly me-me, solipsistic self-interest. There was little transcendent humanity in anyway in Israeli hostage protests.

By the numbers and by their very own phrases, most Israeli-Jews had been merely demanding a return of their hostages. Mentioned one Israeli pundit: Israelis need their hostages again; they don’t need Gaza again.

If the Israeli State is a prison entity, what, then, may be mentioned concerning the U.S.?

Israel’s conflict on Gaza, the West Financial institution and the higher Levant is America’s conflict.

Prefer it or not, Gaza is our genocide.

We hear disinterested mumblings concerning the nationwide curiosity: Gaza is of no nationwide curiosity to the US of America.

I’m afraid it’s too late to for the national-interest dodge. The US is an interventionist hegemon. It has aided, abetted and partaken in, by way of reconnaissance, an extermination marketing campaign in Gaza.

Apart from usually being immoral, the national-interest argument is a type of statism. The premise of national-interest political pragmatism results in this perverse logic:

If enabling the slaughter of Gazans and Iraqis occurred to be within the American nationwide curiosity; then these “endeavors” would have been justified, in accordance with national-interest requirements.

In different phrases, if the U.S. authorities thought of genocide within the nationwide pursuits; then genocide it’s! America ought to act on its divine rights as International decide, jury and executioner.

No. Genocide is just not a foreign-policy matter; it’s a ethical matter.

And the US’ energetic assist for the Gaza Holocaust is a defining occasion within the annals of American foreign-policy aberrations. And, within the nationwide life.

Whereas American overseas coverage is a museum of horrors, Gaza is now the principle exhibit. Why is Gaza qualitatively totally different from overseas coverage deformities that went earlier than?

Right here’s why:

Thus far, America’s overseas coverage has been largely centered on a regime-change program, the place “collateral harm” is basically hid however framed as incidental to a political program.

Repeatedly, the American Masters of the Universe have gone to conflict to make the World Woke. Specifically, make it over in America’s picture. In addition to make the world protected for Israel.

Mass homicide, throughout the American foreign-policy framework, has typically been secondary to a program of “Warring to make the World Woke.” Crudely put, “Be like us or we’ll kill you.”

In Gaza, nevertheless, America has participated in mass homicide for the sake of homicide.

In Gaza, Uncle Sam has lastly achieved an official or formal inversion of all common values.

What the US has accredited and assisted in Gaza is a primetime twenty-first century Holocaust.

In a way, Israel has effected a radical moral inversion in America. Sects of Christianity can now not distinguish Devil from God, mutually unique classes. They favor AIPAC’s edicts over the commandments of the Prince of Peace.

However you might be what you do.

The Israeli State is genocidal by advantage of its actions and the declared intent accompanying these actions—not as a result of it has been denounced as “genocidal” by so-called “antisemites” and “terrorist sympathizers.”

Mentioned Jesus, “Subsequently, by their fruits you’ll know them,” (Matthew 7:20 reads).

One other of Hasbara’s goals is to border the IDF’s ongoing extermination marketing campaign in opposition to a inhabitants of cornered civilians in Gaza, the West Financial institution and East Jerusalem, as byproducts of conflict. As incidental to a simply conflict prosecuted by courageous fighters.

If it’s portrayed as a conflict crime; genocide may be dismissed as not more than a case of, “Oops, Unhealthy issues occur within the butcher’s store of conflict.”

In Gaza, nevertheless, Israel has waged genocide, not conflict. Dressing up a canned hunt as a conflict is pure Hasbara. For genocide is just not conflict. (09/20/2024)

The genocide-as-a-war-crime conceptualization gives cowl and lends authority to criminals and criminality. You mitigate and decrease genocide while you name it a conflict crime.

You see, genocide is just not a conflict crime to which a set of mitigating or explanatory authorized defenses can connect. Genocide is the stand-alone, indefensible crime-of-all-crimes, for which there are not any authorized or ethical defenses. There are not any extenuating circumstances, historic, authorized or different, for genocide.

True, Israel’s genocide has been disrupted by uneven warfare from non-state, Palestinian Resistance fighters. However there is a gigantic energy differential between occupier and occupied. That the serial killers encounter organized, regional resistance doesn’t make genocide a conflict.

Thus far, I’ve anatomized what Israel, state and society, has executed to the Gaza Strip and its folks since October 7.

However what have Gazans, the residing and the martyred, completed? An ideal deal.

Outwardly captives, Palestinians are really liberated from the intolerant political propaganda that grips the West.

They’ve made us see Israel as an irreparably corrupt power, morally and militarily.

The Genocide of Gaza has, very plainly, invalidated Israel and validated the Palestinian trigger.

An ethical, sentient human being want know nothing a lot concerning the historical past of the area to reach at this conclusion.

Right here’s why:

You’ve seen Israel for the contradiction it’s. Israel, astonishingly, has engaged in the mom of all performative contradictions: denying genocide, whereas publicly committing genocide, successfully asserting a birthright to do genocide.

Israel calls for to exist as a privileged, protected aberration, finishing up diabolical deeds with common blessings and absolution.

Give it some thought:

Caught within the protracted, planful act of committing genocide, the responsible occasion, Israel, persists in claiming for itself the correct to kill and deceive with out being thought of and handled as a killer and a con-artist.

The חוצפה! Chutzpah.

To no avail. Human motion is the simple key to man-made actuality. Israel and the US have acted; they’ve been uncovered.

Ethnocide, depopulation, and domicide are by no means justified and might by no means be exculpated. To claim that you’re simply and justified as you perform that which can’t be simply or justified—that is to embody a most grotesque contradiction, and to be lower than human, lower than coherent.

At minimal, Israel deserves the revulsion and isolation reserved for entities whose existence is a confidence trick and a fraud upon us all.

The identical ahistoric Hoppean argumentation utilized to invalidate Israel will serve right here to validate the Palestinians’ actuality, as they’ve been telling it over a long time.

Israel’s televised genocide has corroborated the fact of the Palestinians; their causes for rage and their rights to resistance and recompense.

Palestinians have been telling us for many years that they’ve been set upon by murderers and thieves. Palestinians have informed us they’re being killed and robbed as a matter after all. Their actuality has been irrefutably affirmed since October 7. 

Now, if supporters of Israel’s genocide in Gaza deny this; they, too, can be fraudsters, residing a lie.

The liar’s lifetime of lies we expose by compelling the denier of the Palestinian Holocaust to dwell his personal lie:

Deniers of the Palestinian actuality—Ben Shapiro, Bari Weiss, Biden, Bibi, Blinken, Douglas Murray, Dennis Prager—can be parachuted into occupied Gaza. Genocide would turn out to be their “lived actuality,” not their rhetorical actuality.

Working right here and there as tanks advance on the Denier, ducking-and-diving bombardments from above, as for those who can escape the loss of life radius of American-made 2000- or 500-pound bombs.

These Holocaust Deniers can be recorded scratching for scraps, carrying jerricans of contaminated ingesting water again to nylon dwellings. Climbing over kilometers of decaying buildings, by means of ruins and twisted metallic.

Our digital camera will discover these holocaust deniers queuing with hundreds to make use of a single functioning rest room, plumbing having been destroyed by the Israelis.

The denier of the Palestinian Holocaust can be filmed up-close struggling dysentery, sepsis, and hunger; intubated, amputated or C-sectioned with out narcotics. Twisting on a hospital flooring. Smeared by blood and waste. Listening to the incessant whirring above of Israel’s quadcopter killer drones.

The Holocaust denier will due to this fact LIVE this absolute reality, the ontological reality, of Israel’s Ultimate Answer to its Palestinian Drawback. The character of Palestinian actuality is as they’ve been telling it. QED. Proposition confirmed.

Books have now been written, extra about Israeli and Jewish anguish than concerning the victims. Being Jewish after Gaza is one. Israel’s theocracy. Israel’s ethical and navy degeneration. Israel’s looming collapse. When did it start. Proper wing, left wing. Why, why, why. Everybody is thrashing on breast about Israel. 

An apt response are the phrases of a personality from Southern literature: “Frankly my expensive, I don’t give a rattling!”

And neither must you fear concerning the perpetrators of genocide—

Solely to the extent that punishment is exacted upon Israel for what it has executed to Palestinians. That reparations and restitution are extracted from Israel in perpetuity for Palestinians.

Watch “The Actual Israel Vs. Hasbara Historical past.”